After working with leaders for years, here’s what I know: few authentic leaders are balanced, nor do they wish to be.
Why? In my experience, balance is hard to achieve, because it’s unappealing to them. What’s appealing to these individuals is what they may describe as a “Beautiful Life.”
Leading a beautiful life is an often forgotten idea. It’s doing great things in ALL pillars of your
life (which is grounded in understanding those pillars in the first place). If you’re only focused on doing great things in your business pillar, there’s no time to be a great spouse, parent, friend or spirit-filled person.
Furthermore, they have crossed paths with far too many “successful” people who, despite outward appearance, led joyless, broken lives.
“Balance” is for people-pleasers. Authentic leaders know better. That's why they choose A Beautiful Life.
When life feels fragmented, the instinctive response is to seek better balance. But balance negotiates priorities—it doesn’t establish them. This reflection challenges the myth of a balanced life and reframes integration as the ordering of one’s life around a unifying center.
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If division were simply a personal failure, it would be easier to correct. But it persists because many professional environments reward fragmentation—performance over coherence, output over integration. This reflection explores how division becomes normalized, even incentivized, and why individual effort alone is rarely enough to overcome it.
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